Limited Government

The idea that government's power should be limited draws on Magna Carta, English struggles against royal prerogative, and John Locke's argument that people create government to secure their natural rights and retain the right to resist it when it exceeds its trust. The Declaration of Independence stated that governments are instituted to secure rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The framers designed the Constitution so that the federal government would have only the powers it enumerated, with the rest reserved to the states or the people.

The Constitution limits government in several ways: by listing federal powers in Article I, by dividing power among three branches and between the nation and the states, by forbidding specific actions such as ex post facto laws and titles of nobility, and, through the Bill of Rights, by protecting individual liberties against government interference. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45 that the powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined, and in Federalist No. 51 that government must first be able to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

How limited government should be is one of the oldest debates in American politics. The federal government grew dramatically with the New Deal, World War II, and the Great Society, from about 3 percent of the economy in federal spending in 1930 to more than a fifth today. Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem, and Bill Clinton announced in 1996 that the era of big government is over, though federal spending continued to rise. Supporters of limited government say it protects liberty and prosperity, while those who favor a larger role say government is needed to provide security, opportunity, and protection from private power.